Category: 20 Books of Summer

Well, that’s it for another year. 20 Books of Summer ended yesterday and for myself, it has been a great success. All 5199 pages were read and then some! I read all 20 books – although a lot of those review were mini ones, which I had promised myself I would try to avoid. Time…

Novels about the city of Belfast have a tendency to be set during the Troubles. It is too ingrained in the very fabric of life here to be otherwise. Glenn Patterson’s novel The International does something different. In January 1967, the inaugural meeting of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association too place in The International…

With its forthright exploration of female sexual desire, depression and female emancipation, The Awakening, first published in 1899, was such a shock to readers of the time that it was shunned and then forgotten for decades. This short, but penetrating novel was rediscovered in the 1960s, and is now thought of as a landmark of…

You know I’d go back there tomorrow But for the work I’ve taken on Stoking the star-maker machinery Behind the popular song Free Man in Paris, Joni Mitchell Despite a subtitle that’s enough to put even the hardened music fan off, Barney Hoskyns’ exploration of the Los Angeles singer-songwriter scene of the early 1970s…

Blackeyes is probably better known as the four-part television adaptation (directed by Dennis Potter himself) than it is as a novel. And maybe that’s not a bad thing. Blackeyes is Potter’s exploration of how society values female beauty and examines the subjugation and appropriation of the female voice. It does so through Potter’s recognisable tropes…

Truth or Fiction by Jennifer Johnston continues my Northern Exposure series which highlight literature from Northern Ireland and is also, helpfully, one of my 20 Books of Summer! Jennifer Johnston’s fiction regularly deals with themes of memory, loss and an inability to come to terms with the past and Truth or Fiction is no different.…

A few years ago, I read MJ Hyland’s masterful This Is How and was drawn to her controlled and confident style. Carry Me Down is another exceptional character study that draws the reader into a very particular and insular world – albeit a somewhat claustrophobic one. John Egan is 12 years old. Tall for his…